Vinimaya — From Valuable Niche to Broader P2P Enabler? (Part 4)

In conducting our latest research on Vinimaya, Spend Matters spoke to two references in different industries. The first, in the manufacturing sector, found Vinimaya was capable of implementing "exactly what they said they would deliver" in a complex back-end environment featuring both Ariba and PeopleSoft systems. Deployment time took eight weeks. This company favored Vinimaya's ability over other vendors to provide comparison-shopping capability and to leverage content on supplier websites. They also found the ability to conduct quick orders through the system particularly useful. At the time of the reference call, the company had only deployed the basic SmartMarketplace product capabilities (not SmartAnalytics or SmartAudit).

From a customer service standpoint, this organization reserved accolades for Vinimaya that one usually never hears in describing vendors. "Superb," "almost unbelievable," and "an open policy and willingness to help at all times" they echoed based on their interactive experience. When it comes to actually using the tool, the organization found its capabilities helped drive enhanced search and compliance, but they did reserve slight criticism around areas for improvement to make it more intuitive and "Google-like" in actual, deployed capability for the decentralized users. Still, the tool is clearly working, as they've seen a utilization increase of roughly 600% in one year. A single facility in 2010 processed only a single order leveraging Vinimaya, yet was up to 10,000 at the start of Q2 2011. At the end of the P2P day, this manufacturing organization found what it was looking for with Vinimaya that its stock P2P and ERP purchasing tools were not capable of delivering alone -- indirect procurement compliance across a broader portfolio of spend.

The second organization Spend Matters spoke with represents one of the most distributed deployments of P2P technology that we've ever seen. This organization, a centralized procurement group with no direct decision authority over thousands of decentralized buying groups, had a PeopleSoft back-end and SRM tools already deployed. The organization went live with Vinimaya roughly two years ago in a tightly integrated deployment that enables users, when they log onto PeopleSoft, to automatically enter the Vinimaya environment (through seamless single-sign on and workflow integration). Earlier this year, the organization reported that 40% of its overall purchases were going through the system, a number that represents 90% of the available spend that could theoretically be managed in this manner.

The organization uses Vinimaya in a global environment -- US, Central America, South America, the Far East and parts of Africa. In total, some 500 suppliers are enabled in the system. Vinimaya was key to driving an increased level of spend under management. PeopleSoft "just did not do it" alone. It provided "an excellent core requisitioning and purchasing tool" based on a "1990's view of the world" that was web-enabled yet did not take advantage of the web. But using Vinimaya, the organization was able to leverage content coming from punch-out sites, vendor catalogs, excel spreadsheets (for select items), as well as information coming directly out of PeopleSoft. Despite the adoption of the tool, this organization was still looking for greater ROI, perhaps owning to the decentralized buying activities inherent in all of its activities. Vinimaya, however, has been "great to work with." When the organization has a request, they get a response in the same day.

Based on Spend Matters analysis of Vinimaya's latest offerings and customer experience, it is our recommendation that organizations (and profiles) fitting the following description categories consider Vinimaya:

Organizations looking for a solution to distributed catalog content management

Companies looking to bring more indirect spend under management and drive a better shopping experience for users

Organizations worried about the ability to effectively govern and manage supplier and organizational buying compliance to contract terms and preferred supplier agreements with current tools

Companies looking to analyze search, shopping and spending habits more effectively to drive better purchasing policy, overall governance and to direct efforts most effectively in the highest value areas

To learn more about how tools like Vinimaya fit into the purchasing ecosystem as well as the role (and relative capabilities) of different vendors, we encourage you to register for and download our latest free Compass report in the area: